He didn’t know what would happen if one of the brothers were injured or—worse—killed. They couldn’t risk reverting back to their human form, a very real possibility Zach wouldn’t be able to explain away to a man already touched by madness.
“Drugs? Really?” Anything he knew about making drugs or the drug trade pretty much came from what he learned in books, television shows, or movies, and since that was also his source for werewolves, he was not going to take anything he scraped into his brain about meth as gospel. “The family has owned this land for years, and from what I got from Martha and Ruth, they’ve never caused any trouble.”
“That was then, this is now,” Brown shot back. “The latest batch of Keller boys were nothing but problems. My father used to have to come up here all the time because of one thing or another. And he’d come home tight-lipped and tense, muttering about the family and their mountain. Something attacked him that night, something big and vicious. Just like the dogs the Kellers run. So yeah, you can try to cover up whatever happened that day, maybe because Gibson has something on you or you think you’re going to get some from him if you keep your mouth shut and do what he tells you, but there are other people in this town that I’m not willing to risk with these dogs just because you’re looking for a piece of ass.”
“My being gay or looking for a piece of ass doesn’t give you the right to trespass on Keller land, and since you had to pass through mine to get up here, I have a vested interest in what you’re doing here. One question, did you come up here with a warrant?” Zach made sure the shotgun was pointed toward the ground, not wanting to agitate Pat any further, but it didn’t seem like the sheriff was willing to listen to reason. “Or did you think you could shoot one of them and no one would know it was you? Because that’s what it looks like to me, a vigilante cop without anything, any evidence of wrongdoing to back him up.”
“I don’t need a warrant to investigate a dangerous animal.” He gestured with his gun, the muzzle sweeping over both wolves. Gibson mantled, arching his body and bristling his fur. The sounds coming from Gibson’s throat rivaled the thunder Zach’d heard rolling over the lake in the middle of the night. Ellis keened, his ears flattening against his broad head when Brown raised his weapon. “No jury in the world would convict me. Not when they see the size of these things. Not when I pull up photos of what was left of my father. Not a damn jury would think I wasn’t in the right.”
Zach wasn’t sure what set off the chaos. It was like a butterfly effect, with a single flap of a pair of pretty wings triggering a tsunami of violence. He heard the blast of a gun going off, and then the sting of gunpowder, its sulfurous, foul bloom, slapped at his nose and eyes. There was a scream and Zach couldn’t tell where it was coming from until he realized his throat was turning raw and the sound coming up from his chest was one of anguish and fear.
There was blood, blood everywhere, and Zach was caught watching a tragedy suspended in drops of time. He dropped the shotgun, throwing it aside, and flung himself in front of the wolves. He needed to stop what was happening, somehow pull back whatever had happened and started the sea of red pouring over the rocky soil.
“Get out of there!” the sheriff shouted, bringing his weapon back up. “I’ll shoot you too if I have to.”
“Oh God, Ellis!” Zach struggled to find the wound on the wolf’s body, but there was too much blood, and his fur was sticky with decayed leaves and dirt. “Please, don’t die. Please don’t die on us.”
The ground was cold on his knees, the snow seeping into his jeans, and Ellis was still—too damned still—under Zach’s hands. He didn’t know what to do. Common sense told him to press against the wound, but that wouldn’t buy Ellis much time. The wolf’s breathing was shallow, the struggle to draw in air clearly visible in the uneven rise and fall of Ellis’s rib cage. His eyes were closed, but his muscles twitched, rippling under his pelt. Then Zach’s probing found the gunshot wound.
The bullet had dug a deep furrow through the black fur on Ellis’s broad chest and into the meat of his shoulder. Shuddering, the wolf gasped and whined through Zach’s ministrations, clenching his muzzle tight when Zach pressed against the gushing wound. All Zach could hear was the buzz of the sheriff’s crazed shouting, then the horrifying sounds of bones shifting.
Loud creaks seemed to be coming from all around him, beneath his fingers and somewhere near the rock face. A part of his mind tried to make sense of the cacophony, the reverberation of splitting bone and tearing ligaments, but his fleeting thoughts scattered as he focused on Ellis. It wasn’t until he heard the sheriff’s inarticulate cries that he realized Gibson was shifting a few feet away, his amber eyes filled with rage and revenge.
THE TWO years he’d spent trying to coax his brother out of the wolf had felt like a life sentence he could never finish serving. Gibson’d locked himself away behind bars he’d forged himself, sworn to protect Ellis from any and all harm until his brother could reemerge, could heal from the nightmares he carried inside his mind. To lose Ellis because an ignorant man carried a grudge against the phantasm would’ve been laughable if his brother’s blood wasn’t staining the ground and Zach’s hands.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Brown shouted at Zach, his lips peeled back from his teeth, practically a mockery of a wolf’s snarl. “I need to finish the job. Or do you want to just let it bleed out and die in agony? Because I’m good with that too.”
His change hit him hard, his anger driving the wolf out of his blood and off of his skin. Gibson’s shoulders began to ache before he was even aware of the shift’s initial tingle. Then the snap of his spine stiffening was all the warning he needed to brace for the pain.
The human in his mind broke through with a harder hit. To go wolf was easy, a shift to an animal that humans had—on some level—within them, but the evolution from a primal creature to a thinking one was nearly catastrophic in its agony. He understood Ellis’s preference to live within his own fur. It was simpler, a life driven by instinct. There was only hunger and fatigue with flashes of anger fueled by territory and simple wants. There wasn’t much to do but live in the now of each minute. Life happened around the wolf, and time flowed in different ribbons around the form, the dread of the next second lost under whatever whim struck the creature they became.
His mind remembered what it was to be human when he cloaked himself in fur and fang, but his instincts, his urges, were always pure wolf. At least until a very mortal rage struck him.